The end of the year is approaching, and you know what that means – a new Call of Duty. Infinity Ward takes the reins this time around with a new entry in the Modern Warfare series. After Modern Warfare 3′s massively disappointing campaign, IW had a lot to prove with this latest effort, and I think they mostly stuck the landing. This time around, the campaign feels intentional and like it’s actually got something to say.
CAMPAIGN:
While I wouldn’t call the game’s main story anything to write home about, it still manages to be one of the best Infinity Ward campaigns we’ve had in a while. Thankfully, Modern Warfare 4 mostly does away with the big open-world missions of the previous entry. The campaign is much more straightforward and linear, which is a massive compliment here. Being more linear lets the developers curate a message, vibe, and tone much more clearly than in the previous game. Each mission throughout the 7-hour campaign does a great job of building tension and suspense, even though I sometimes wished we’d ditch Price and stick with the new protagonist.
The new protagonist is a young South Korean soldier, Private Park, who is about to experience the battlefield for the first time. You and the rest of your squad have basically been living life on easy street up until North Korea launches an invasion. Some past games have tackled what a war between the two nations would be like, but few are as interesting or as polished as this one.
The campaign zig-zags between Private Park and the aforementioned Captain Price, the face of the Modern Warfare saga. In Modern Warfare 3, Price’s partner, Soap, was killed. Because of this loss, Price has become a much darker and more intense person, and his journey throughout the campaign is him tying up loose ends and righting any wrongs he can. Price intends to deal with anyone associated with the series’ main antagonist, Makarov. During this pursuit, Price is made aware of The Archer (Mads Mikkelsen), another looming threat that has to be stopped. While it was cool to have Mikkelsen make an appearance, I didn’t think it was a major standout performance in his career. Personally, I much preferred his performance in Death Stranding, but it’s awesome to see that he is happy to do more work in this medium.
I’ve never been too attached to the Modern Warfare story or characters, as I’ve often found them a little too one-note for my liking. I do like how this game takes this character we already know and really flips them on their head. Price comes off as a totally new man dealing with grief and filled with vengeance. It feels like we’re meeting the character for the first time, and it’s really cool to see how far Infinity Ward was willing to go with a fan favourite.
As cool as it was to see such a big swing in how Price is portrayed, I found myself latching onto Private Park and his cast of characters a lot more. Park’s campaign section feels much more “Call of Duty” to me, which I feel the recent campaigns have been missing. There is a very striking mission that is basically “South Korean D-Day.” It’s intense, bloody, violent as all get out, and it left an impact on me more than any other mission in this game did. Getting to experience this boots-on-the-ground traumatic invasion through the eyes of a character who’s never seen combat is very powerful and had me wishing I’d get to spend more time with Park. There comes a moment in the narrative where the events of both characters overlap, and the payoff is cool, but it didn’t blow my mind.
The campaign will take you all across Korea as well as the rest of the world, such as New York, Paris, and Mumbai. The graphics are so stunning and filled with detail, which makes the globetrotting throughout the campaign feel much more realized. Price’s missions are much more varied, but that means that some of them might not be so successful, which unfortunately was the case. There are a few sections that require hand-to-hand melee combat, which just doesn’t feel very good. There are also a few forced stealth moments that are unforgiving and completely kill the momentum, and tragically, the fun. The absolute standout moment for Price had to be the New York nightclub mission where you basically turn into Keanu Reeves going full John Wick. It’s pretty dope, and it made me wonder what an Infinity Ward John Wick game would look like. Outside of that standout mission, playing as Price just had me wishing I was playing as Park.
MULTIPLAYER:
The last Call of Duty game that I reviewed was 2024’s Black Ops 6, whose big claim to fame was the new omnimovement system. Basically, you were able to perform any movement in any direction. Being able to leap all over the place felt very cool at first, but it wasn’t the massive gamechanger I thought it was going to be. The only people who really benefited from the new movement were the game’s highest echelon of players. Most players would just resort to the old-fashioned “immediately-go-prone” strategy that has been working for the better part of 15 years. Not to mention that the time to kill in BO6 was very, very fast. I say all this because I found adjusting to MW4 to be way easier than expected.
In Black Ops 6, you played as a bunch of super soldiers who could run on walls and knee-slide across the map like you were made of thousands of small wheels. While that intense movement design isn’t present here, the game still feels fast and intense in moment-to-moment gameplay. Player movement feels as satisfying and fast-moving as ever, but it doesn’t feel like there’s anything really new or shocking that sets this game apart from its sister games.
What I love about this game most is that the time to kill (TTK) is way more generous than it has been in recent memory. While the age-old strategy of immediately laying prone when seeing someone still works, you can absolutely disengage if you find yourself in that situation. The maps are a little bit more open this time around, so it’s actually pretty easy to find yourself face-to-face with somebody, hitting them with a tactical and getting out. I don’t recall being able to disengage from an enemy player as much as I have been able to in this game.
While the maps are typically more open, that comes with a pretty big caveat – they take a long time to move through. It didn’t seem like a particularly big issue to me at first because of how fast you can move around, but I found that the spawns would often just drop me off in a corner of the map as far away from any action as possible. Oftentimes, a match in MW4 goes like this: running into a fight, getting a kill, dying, spawning as far away as humanly possible, rinse and repeat. I think Call of Duty is at its best when you can quickly get back into the action after a death, and MW4 does not seem to agree with me. For what it’s worth, “Stakeout” from Black Ops 6 is one of my favourite maps in recent Call of Duty, which is definitely not a commonly held opinion… so maybe I’m the weird one.
While on the subject of the game’s maps, I find them to be the biggest problem I’ve got with MW4. I don’t think there is a single 6v6 map that I was excited to see when it would show up in the multiplayer lobbies. I’d argue that this is the least interesting batch of maps we’ve had in years. Many of the maps are uneven in design, which typically means that one team is heavily advantaged just based on the side they spawned on. Transit 213 is a very confusing map to me. It’s easy enough to navigate, but the amount of tight corridors behind buses, in buses, and in the back alleys makes for a ridiculously annoying gameplay loop. It just seems like no matter what you do on this map, you are punished. Going out in the open to the abandoned buses often means you’ll get sniped by someone from the alley or from an opposing bus. Killing a player hiding out in a bus feels like such a herculean task because they can always see you and shoot you before you can see or shoot them. I always avoid this map if I can.
Rooftops does the exact opposite of Transit 213. It’s mostly wide open except for a series of small rooms and little awkward transitional points that take you from point A to point B but force you to walk across a small wooden plank. If you misstep while protecting yourself, you fall off to your death. There are a couple of these plank sections in the map that just feel super out of place, and since the map is very much wide open, you’re basically signing yourself up to die if you take those paths. Even though the maps have different issues, they all seem to have the same core problem – if you manage to find and secure one section of the map, you’ll have an obvious advantage. Every single map in the game seems to have that problem, and it’s the one reason why I’m feeling a bit of fatigue already when it comes to Call of Duty multiplayer. I usually have a lot more fun than this with new Call of Duty games, but the maps just aren’t doing it for me.
I haven’t even mentioned that I’ve been playing this on the Nintendo Switch 2. I have to admit, I’m pretty stunned that this game plays at a pretty steady 60fps. I’m pretty sure the only reason that’s possible is that the game is running at a pretty rough resolution. While I’m always a frames-over-graphical-fidelity guy, I had a pretty hard time playing this game for long stretches of time. The biggest problem with the Switch 2 version of Modern Warfare 4 is that it is extremely fuzzy and blurry. I have a brand new 58-inch TV, which has made gaming such a dream for me lately. However, playing MW4 multiplayer on my Switch 2 with this setup makes it very hard to see anybody at a long range. Every texture blurs into the next, and it makes me feel sick if my session goes too long. I didn’t notice these issues as much during the campaign, which I’m assuming is because that’s more scripted and doesn’t require a bunch of other internet connections to be accounted for, but wow, it can be a struggle to play this on a larger display.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 is a rare occurrence for the series – the campaign outshines the multiplayer. While I didn’t find the campaign to be the best Infinity Ward has offered, it was a massive improvement on the previous entry, and they took a lot of interesting swings that worked out for the most part. The multiplayer, on the other hand, doesn’t make any real attempts to shake up what we already know. The maps don’t have the same personality earlier entries in the series had, and there’s often too much downtime between deaths. While the game manages to run at shockingly high framerates on the Nintendo Switch 2, it definitely isn’t the best console to experience it on due to the fuzzy and blurry resolution. However, if you’re somebody who usually plays each new Call of Duty on release (like myself) you’ve probably already bought the game. If the Switch 2 is the only console you have access to, and you’re craving some multiplayer shooting, this is without a doubt the best FPS available on the console right now.